1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to telecommunications and, in particular, to voice identification. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to initiating authentication of the identity of a callee at an intermediary device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telephone service has created communication channels worldwide, and those channels continue to expand with the advent of cellular and other wireless services. A person can simply take a telephone off-hook and dial a destination number or press a send button and be connected to a telephone line around the world.
Today, the public switching telephone network (PSTN), wireless networks, and private networks telephone services are based on the identification of the wireless telephone or wireline that a calling party uses. Services are personalized according to wireless telephone or wireline telephone number, where services associated with one telephone number are not accessible for another telephone number assigned to the same subscriber. For example, there is typically a first set of service features and billing options assigned to a home line number, a second set of service features and billing options assigned to an office line number, and a third set of service features and billing options assigned to a cellular telephone number. The networks process calls to and from each of these different subscriber telephones based on a separate telephone number.
One of the services provided by many networks is caller identification. However, caller identification (caller ID) is limited to identification the wireline or wireless telephone number and the name of the subscriber of a service. Where multiple people share a single line, only the name of the person who establishes a service is displayed as the caller ID, often causing confusion about who is actually calling.
In addition, caller ID is limited because caller ID only flows to the calling party. Further, returning the identification of the telephone number that a caller has dialed is redundant and many telephones already provide a display of the numbers dialed by a caller as the caller is dialing.
Therefore, in view of the foregoing, it would be advantageous to provide a method, system, and program for providing a calling party with the identity of the person answering a call (e.g. the callee). In addition, it would be advantageous to provide a method, system, and program for specifying services available to a callee at any telephony device according to the identity of the callee.
Each service provided from by the PSTN must be extensively tested for faults and requires expensive hardware for implementation. Therefore, in view of the foregoing, it would be a further advantage to provide a method, system, and program for implementing services by devices external to the PSTN.